Touch by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online Page B

Atwood. The reason she set this up isn’t because she thinks I’m lying when I say the guys touched my breasts even though I told them not to. Or maybe it’s a legal thing, maybe they’ll call Doctor Atwood as their expert witness.
    The problem is, it’s all gotten pretty jumbled. There’s the story I first told Joan, the story that got repeated, the story I told after that, the story I’m telling now. So if Doctor Atwood can help me figure it out, it’s worth all the money Dad and Joan are paying.
    “Maisie,” Doctor Atwood is saying. “Try to focus, all right?”
    “Sorry,” I say. “What were we talking about?”
    Doctor Atwood says, “That one detail. Which is…you and your friends are in the ninth grade, right?”
    “Right.” Hasn’t she heard a word I’ve said?
    “And you rode on the high school bus? Which is where it happened?”
    “Right again,” I say.
    “In the backseat?”
    “That’s correct.”
    “So here’s the part I don’t understand. Unless things have changed dramatically since I was a kid, ninth graders don’t get to sit in the backseat of the bus. That’s senior territory. Reserved for seniors who don’t drive yet, or who don’t have cars or know anyone with a car. Or the ones who had their license revoked.”
    I smile. It’s the first completely smart thing that Doctor Atwood has ever said.
    “Good point.”
    “So how come you were sitting there, you and your ninth-grade friends?”
    I’m glad she asked. Because the answer involves the only part of this whole thing that I still like thinking about. Even though it’s going to hurt, I like remembering the way Shakes could be.
    I say, “I was the first one on the bus. Just me and the driver, Big Maureen. I’d known that was going to happen. Joan had looked up the bus route, they had it at the post office, and she totally spazzed out that I had the longest ride of any kid in the district. But there was nothing she could do, the school blamed the bus company and vice versa, on and on.
    “So I shouldn’t have been surprised. But the first day of school, when I got on the bus and realized that I was actually first, I said good morning to Big Maureen and sort of panicked and headed straight to the back of bus. You’d think if I was feeling nervous, I’d have stayed near Big Maureen, but Big Maureen isn’t the kind ofperson you want to stay near. She was never mean or scary, just slumpy and depressed. Joan had told me she was a single mom with five kids who needed the job. It felt weird, to be one of two people on that huge bus. I don’t know why. It was almost like Big Maureen and I were in this huge yellow spaceship and we’d blasted off before the rest of the crew had shown up. I was glad when we slowed down to pick up someone else. And I was practically ecstatic when I saw we were picking up Shakes. I watched him do his little crablike hop down his driveway. I was so glad to see him, I wished I could have hugged him.”
    “Why couldn’t you?” asks Doctor Atwood.
    I say, “Is that a serious question?”
    Now it’s Doctor Atwood’s turn to smile.
    “Go on, Maisie,” she says.
    “It would have been…uncomfortable.”
    Why couldn’t I have hugged him? Maybe because it would have reminded everybody—that is, Shakes and me—of the fact that now I had a pair of breasts.
    I say, “When Shakes got on, I was doing these giant semaphores, waving at him from the back. He smiled thiscool loopy grin and he came back and sat next to me.
    “Soon after, we crossed the reservoir. We had maybe ten minutes with just the two of us alone on the bus before anyone else got on. The scenery was really pretty there, but it was so early. We were both really tired, and we sort of fell asleep.”
    Leaning on each other’s shoulders.
    That’s a little detail that might help the doctor make sense of all this, but I don’t want to tell it. In fact, the more I think about the story—the beginning of the story—the less I want to